Interview With Socialight CEO, Dan Melinger

Socialight lets you use your cellphone or computer to post virtual sticky notes in a specific location. The sticky note can be a random thought or a well-written recommendation and can hold the form of a written text or a photo (video & audio are coming soon). The company is angel funded with fewer than 10 employees and has already been mentioned on the Wall Street Journal, CNN, Wired Magazine, & the New York Times. I talked to Dan Melinger, co-founder of Kamida, the company behind Socialight, to learn more about the service.

The case for location-based-services
Dan started off with a philosophical perspective talking about how humans have always been interested in communicating with the people living around them either through etchings on stone or going to the village square to learn what’s new. In essence, Dan thinks that the society we live in today has evolved. Cities have grown larger and we can travel faster. But although today’s technology allows us to communicate across borders we still have this need to communicate with the people around us. And Dan thinks that communication tools currently available haven’t yet caught up to meet this need. It’s sort of weird that today you can very easily communicate with people with similar interests wherever they are in the world but it’s much more challenging to communicate with people who were once where you are right now. Dan says that:

“What Socialight does is effectively create an additional layer of context for the real world so that wherever you are, you can find interesting and useful content that’s relevant to you. This is useful whether you’re in a place you know well, or one you’ve never been to before. In essence you can easily get the inside scoop on a place without necessarily having in-the-know friends there.”

The User’s Perspective
The short Discovery Channel segment below runs you through the most common Socialight use cases and demonstrates how compelling it can be in your every day life. But be aware that what is presented is the best-case-scenario type of demo. Dan is using a high-end phone, with passive positioning (no need to enter the location manually), and testing it in NewYork City (Socialight’s home court where a lot of its users are based).

Virtual Stickies Beyond Recommendations
A lot of the activity on Socialight revolves around recommendations. And the company is encouraging that since a recommendation is relevant to other users as soon as they start using Socialight, and is useful to a broad range of people. But people are also using the Sticky notes concept in some other interesting ways:

• Publications and individuals creating their location-based content channels: Not For Tourists, Picky Malmö, Time Out New York.
• Residents of the same area connecting with other people nearby. People post their interests and some places where they hang out and others find them and connect. This way, people from the same neighborhood can meet virtually or in real-life.
• Groups for collecting stories around a topic. Like Dumb Things We’ve Done or First Kiss.
• Sharing stories from your life. For example Nate Hitchcock, an artist based in Chicago IL, created a historical account of the places that are important to him.

Anyone can participate:
Socialight’s strategy is to allow anyone to participate in creating sticky notes. This means individual users as well as hyperlocal blog writers and editorial content creators like TimeOut NewYork (with which Socialight has a content syndication agreement).

Let’s say you finish eating at a restaurant. On the way out you can pick up your cellphone and write a sticky note commending that restaurant for its great service. Alternatively you can wait until you get home and write that sticky note from your computer.

In addition, the company is rolling out tools to batch import geographically-relevant information and turn them into sticky notes. Import formats include GeoRSS feeds, KML (Google Earth files), and excel files. So let’s say that you write a blog about fine dining in NYC. You can turn every new restaurant recommendation post you write into a sticky note by giving Socialight your GeoRSS feed. The sticky notes created will be automatically displayed to relevant users in real life (for example, while they’e walking in the vicinity of that resturant). If you are interested to participate in the early batch upload program Socialight would be glad to talk to you (email to: contact at socialight dot com).

How Socialight Positions Users
Socialight is agnostic to the underlying technologies used to determine the location. They currently do four types of positioning:

1. Type-it-in: The vast majority of users type in their location manually in order to tell Socialight where they are and get relevant sticky notes. Although this method clearly poses some friction in terms of user experience it is surprising that users don’t seem to be too bothered to do it.
2. Opt-in Triangulation: The case is different in the UK where a user can send an sms to 88811 to opt in to allow Socialight to access his location. This is possible through an integration with a British telecom aggregator. The positioning is done by triangulation on the operator’s side with the user’s permission and my guess is that Socialight is having to pay a fee per user to get access to that information.
3. Wifi Triangulation: Socialight can determine the location of a wifi-enabled cellphone or laptop by integrating with the publicly available positioning API from Loki, a product from SkyHook Wireless. Loki approcimates your location through WPS, wifi positioning service. WPS works by knowing which wifi card to be able to triangulate your location based on the wifi access points around you.
4. GPS: Finally Socialight is releasing a mobile J2ME client that will automatically get the location of a user if the phone has a GPS chip or if it is connected to a GPS device through bluetooth.

The advantages of a dual web / mobile interface
Dan thinks that accompanying a mobile service with a regular web application creates synergy. An internet site is good for certain things like managing your sticky notes and contacts while the mobile is really great for consuming that content on the go. Both channels seem to be effective in user lead generation. About half of Socialight’s users start using the service through their mobiles (wap page & sms) and the other half come in through the web application. I would have thought the balance would be much more skewed in favor of the web application.

Business Model
Socialight is currently looking at multiple ways to make money from their service. They currently display some ads on their main web application and that helps them cover some of their costs. They are however completely against the idea of pushing advertising or paid messages to people’s cellphones in the form of sms.

In some cases Socialight has to charge users to get access to their location, but this fee is required by the operator and Socialight wants to make it as cheap as possible to use its service. One way to do that would be to make a sponsor pay that fee.

Final Note
Socialight has been in the location-based services arena for a while and their product management guys are being wise about not hedging their bets on a single positioning technology, application interface, or mobile platform. Building communities is challenging on the web and even more so on the mobile. Most users are not fully aware about all the great things that their mobile can do for them. And any social / local / mobile company including Socialight will have to play its part in educating users about the possibilities. In addition, mobile internet access is still somewhat expensive but becoming cheaper. That trend along with increasing availibility of positioning services will play well in the favor of Socialight and other similar companies. If you’re interested in location-based services or innovative mobile applications then I’d encourage you to take Socialight on a ride and tell everyone about your favorite places.

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